Subtle ways to help redirect your students.

LAURA RIGOLOSI
Literacy & Special Education Specialist

​I recently met with a colleague who had just returned from visiting a science teacher’s classroom, and when I asked her about her visit, she replied, “I love being in his classroom. I mean, he’s such a natural teacher.” I nodded, because I know just what she means. In this particular teacher’s classroom, the students produce thoughtful work and always seem engaged, even cheerful, which is no small feat for high schoolers. He has a gentle, relaxed way about him and when students start to act a little silly or get off task, he swiftly ushers them to their seat or nudges them to refocus. 

I kept thinking about that phrase “he’s such a natural,” and what it means to be a “natural” at teaching. Or anything, really. I thought about the teachers I’ve worked with whom I consider to be “naturals,” and how they seem to teach effortlessly, how they bring humor into the classroom and make students feel safe and welcome so they can focus on learning and engaging with the content. 

Professor and mentor Ruth Vinz always pushes educators to name the verbs we use in teaching. In other words, what does it mean to “teach?” In this case, what are those moves this “natural” teacher makes to keep his class running smoothly, so class time is spent on learning?

Non-confrontational strategies

Our classroom management resource can help you encourage students in your class who may need some redirecting, and proactively stop flare-ups before they start. The goal is to maximize class time with your students, and this resource may provide fresh ideas. As you look at the list, notice which strategies you are already doing and which you can try.

Below are some non-confrontational strategies from this resource that I use all the time. 

Please note: if anyone in class is in danger of hurting themselves or others, the teacher needs to reach out for help immediately.
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Acknowledgement

To the class aloud, “I want to say thank you to x, y and z for working quietly on their assignment.” Or “Everyone is working so well, keep up the good work!”

This strategy notices and names students who are on task, or working towards the right direction. Naming students who are doing the “right thing” is a great teacher trick, as it allows students to hear their name in a positive way. This acknowledgement can even sound like, “I love how you are partnering together and sharing your ideas,” as this feedback names the specific ways students are working in your class. When teachers use positive narration, they are creating a positive cycle that other students will want to engage in. 

Proximity

Teacher stands close to students who are talking or disruptive. The teacher continues to stand there until the students have stopped their disruptions.

This is such a classic teacher move that so many of us practice without even knowing it! When a student begins to get a bit distracted, walking over to the student and standing near their seat is often enough of a gesture to refocus the distracted student, instead of elevating the situation by saying their name in a disciplinary way.

Along this same trajectory, it often helps to walk farther away from students who are speaking too softly for classmates to hear. Students tend to speak loud enough for their teacher to hear, but if the teacher is moving to the far side of the classroom, they will have to raise their voice to become more understandable. This is another non-confrontational way of nudging students to project their voices instead of asking students to “speak louder.” 

Waiting

Teacher is speaking to the class when talking begins. The teacher freezes mid-sentence — doesn’t speak or move — and doesn’t speak again until the room is quiet.

We can all remember that teacher who could silence a class with just a look. Perhaps by widening their eyes, or a slight tilt of their head. Before you knew it, students were shushing each other and sitting up a bit straighter. 

While there may be a touch of teacher magic happening in these scenarios, the “Wait” strategy is an effective way to redirect your class without raising your voice! Sometimes it takes a minute for students to get quiet. This strategy is a reminder that teachers don’t have to talk louder or speak over students; on the contrary, it is more powerful to pause and wait for class to quiet down. 

It’s also a good reminder that sometimes silence or “wait time” in the classroom is necessary — particularly during discussions or after the teacher or a student poses a question. 

There are some teachers who may appear as “naturals” in the classroom, but if you start to notice and name their teaching moves, you will find that they are practicing non-confrontational strategies with their students. These small moves are ones that all of us can employ, and with some consistency and a bit of teacher swagger, perhaps we can all be “naturals” as well. 

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CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT, RESOURCES

Three strategies for expanding student engagement in an in-person environment. 

LAURA RIGOLOSI
Literacy & Special Education Specialist

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Lately I’ve been visiting classrooms and seeing students on their Chromebooks, typing away and answering text-based questions on a Nearpod or on Google Classroom. Teachers are circulating and peering over their students’ shoulders, checking their screens to get a sense of where students are in their classwork, and to ensure they are not sliding between windows to play games or watch videos. At the end of class, teachers sometimes ask students to share a few of their answers, remind them to submit their work, and then class is dismissed. As students are packing up, the teacher may remind students to finish what they didn’t complete for homework. 

In a sense, it’s almost as though this type of classroom instruction could have been facilitated in a remote setting. Students are so accustomed to educational apps that they can do their classwork without even attending class. But we are no longer remote, and as far as I can tell today, most schools are not planning to return to a fully remote school program. 

So how can we make the most of being together in person and increase in-class interactions?

Get students talking

The simplest way to get your students engaged is to include “turn and talks” in your lesson plan, allowing conversations to happen in pairs. Decide on the most strategic moments to include a turn and talk — this could be any time you want students to mull over or think through a key concept during class. Asking students to talk to the person next to them will help them practice their thinking in a low-stakes way. I often find that when just one or two students are participating after a teacher poses a question, it signals that other students are not yet ready to share their thoughts with the rest of the class. 

Posing a question and asking students to turn and discuss it with the person sitting near them is a way to get students thinking about the key topic, and provides a moment for the teacher to circulate and listen in on students’ thinking. This creates a perfect opportunity to cull new voices in the whole class participation: “What you said, Jess, is a really helpful explanation as to why it can inadvertently hurt our economy. Would you mind sharing this out to the whole group when we come back together?”

Make thinking visible

Pull out some chart paper and ask students to share their thinking in groups and on paper. Working on Google Docs as a group can be useful for co-writing or sharing ideas, but working on chart paper is a more strategic way to share thinking within a group and to help make the thinking visual. Some graphic organizers lend themselves well to chart paper, particularly when students are using a graphic organizer to process a concept. For example, the 4 As Protocol works well on chart paper. My colleague Courtney Brown and I have often used this protocol on chart paper as a way to demonstrate thinking about a text through these specific lenses, which can look like this: 

Bring voices to the whole class

If you were a real rookie on Zoom during the pandemic (like me) and tried to have a full class discussion (like me), you quickly longed for the days to return to in-person instruction. I wince when I recall the first time I asked students to discuss what we had read — there were moments of everyone talking over each other, or everyone muted and awkward silence. While I had asked students to collect their thoughts in writing as the primary step to having a discussion, I could not ask students to turn and talk casually for 45 seconds. I could have created breakout rooms for a minute or two, but somehow breakout rooms seem too  formal.

Now that we are in class together, let’s take the opportunity to help our students learn how to have a discussion as a whole group. Work up to a larger discussion by building small steps along the way: first a quick write on the topic, then a turn and talk, and finally, opening up the chance for students to share with the whole class. Using a discussion rubric in live time and then reflecting on the discussion is another way to remind students what makes for an effective conversant.

During the pandemic, we were flexible and experimented with different online learning tools. We discovered ways to teach and assess students, and we did the best we could during a most difficult time. But now that we have returned in person, let’s take advantage of being together and find ways to use the lessons we’ve learned during remote learning to increase interactions in our in-person classrooms. 

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How do we decide which words to teach our students? 

LAURA RIGOLOSI
Literacy & Special Education Specialist

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In Including All Learners, a course I co-teach with my colleague Jacqui Stolzer, we design our content based on the questions we wonder about as teachers. One that comes up often is: How do we decide which words to teach our students? Asking this question challenges us to think about how to focus our instructional time, and nudges us to be more purposeful in designing our curriculum. 

Understanding tiered vocabulary

One of the ways we decide which words to teach is by using the tiered vocabulary concept developed by Dr. Isabel Beck. Beck thinks of vocabulary words as belonging to one of three categories:
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• Tier 1 words are basic words that students typically know, unless they are an ELL, and in that case they may need to be taught that word. Tier 1 words include: computer, sunlight, coffee, sleep, etc.
• Tier 2 words are those that are often used in classrooms and extend beyond one particular subject area, including: analyze, tweak, estimate, determine — words in that academic arena.
• Tier 3 words are highly specific for each content area, and are housed within a particular subject. Examples of Tier 3 words include: parabola, hypotenuse, simile, monarchy, osmosis, etc.

While it is interesting to group words into these three categories, how does this practice impact our instructional decisions? 

Narrowing your focus

When designing lessons and prioritizing instructional time, it may be helpful to consider which tiers and key terms are worthy of classroom instruction.

As we can see above, Tier 3 words are easy to identify; these are the words that we need to teach in order for students to understand a particular concept. For example, in an ecosystem unit of a Living Environment course, words such as “abiotic” and “biotic” are Tier 3 words that are necessary terms in the unit; they are the specific words used to identify non-living or living parts of an ecosystem. In a sense, Tier 3 words are easy to determine in a curriculum because they are entwined with concepts in a particular unit. 

Tier 2 words, however, are often not taught explicitly since the assumption is that students already know what they mean. It’s the Tier 2 words that need extra attention in our classrooms. These are the words to spend time teaching and modeling for your students. What this looks like will vary depending on your grade level and content area. 

Modeling for your students

Consider a Tier 2 word such as analyze. Most students are familiar with that word by the time they reach middle school, but what does it really look like in math or science or English?

When students are asked to analyze a text, it’s helpful for teachers to model this work, demonstrating the pieces of a text analysis and sharing the tools students need to analyze a text on their own. Think about all the steps that are imperative for analyzing a text. If I were modeling how to analyze a passage, I might:

• Demonstrate how I reword the passage in a way that makes sense to me, or paraphrase what the passage means
• Consider any striking or interesting features of that passage that make me think or wonder a bit more. (Here I have to check myself that I don’t get too far off on a tangent! I have to script this or else it becomes a bit too unwieldy… ). 
• Try to position that particular passage with another passage earlier in that text, or with another text
• Synthesize my analysis by explaining what I find significant about the passage and why 

Analysis can change shape depending on the class — in science, analyzing lab data might look different from analyzing a passage in English. But in both cases, dedicating instructional time to demonstration of the term will help strengthen students’ skills, giving students access to academic thinking and language. 

Tiered vocabulary can help you classify key terms for your grade level and content area, and as a result, make instructional decisions that hone in on teaching new or unfamiliar words for your students. Finding a balance between content-specific, Tier 3 words and more general academic terms like those in Tier 2 can help narrow your focus and increase student comfort with the words they encounter in your classroom. 

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INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN, LITERACY

Capitalize on critical thinking, reflection, and action to keep your students actively engaged. 

LAURA RIGOLOSI
Literacy & Special Education Specialist

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“It’s so hard for me to come up with something to do every day in my class. I know my lessons should prepare students for their summative assessment, but, like, what do I do every day? Every class?”

This was how my meeting began with a relatively new teacher I am mentoring. He knows where he needs to end up in his unit, but what can he do in every single class that doesn’t feel monotonous? What various activities can he use in his class that work towards a concept he is building? In his case, his summative assessment will be an analysis of a theme in the class novel, but he also aims to use the text to teach other concepts, other literacy skills.

Enter our student engagement resource (download here).

It’s so easy to get stuck doing the same activities each day. Using this resource, you can unlock practical ideas for engaging students cognitively, and find ways to spur students to think about the class text or class concepts from multiple perspectives. I particularly appreciate how these activities are easily adaptable, and can be rooted in concepts students are learning. Across four categories, you can imagine fresh lesson ideas, no matter where you're at in your career. 
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GET STUDENTS...
Thinking

Quote-ables: Pull meaningful quotes from student writing or discussions, and post them around the room.

This activity is a way to synthesize students’ ideas, reflections, and wonderings around a topic, and the result is that student voice becomes a new collaborative text. When students see meaningful snippets of their own writing on chart papers around the classroom walls, they will feel seen. A wonderful add-on to this could be to ask students to respond to others’ writing using post-it notes or directly on the chart paper itself. 

This activity reinforces ideas discussed in class, celebrates student voice, and helps students see concepts through their classmates’ perspectives.

GET STUDENTS...
Doing

Get centered: Create student choice by organizing 2-3 different activities around a text (vocab, drawing, summarizing). Allow students to choose which center they want to focus on.

Creating a “centers” lesson is a way to get students up and out of their seats to focus on a topic of study using various manipulatives. A variation of this is to create “stations” where students rotate between the stations (or center). Station or center lessons require quite a bit of planning in order to create independent activities that are allotted a similar timeframe, but a “centers” lesson ensures students are actively engaged, and teachers are observing and providing support when needed. 

GET STUDENTS...
Feeling

Gratitudes: Say thank you to all students on task until everyone is participating. 

A positive way to get students on track instead of focusing on what they are not doing: “Thank you, Tiffany, Fatima, and Derek, for sitting down quickly and taking out your notes. Thank you, Marcus, for getting started right away on our opening question…”

​These small statements of praise help to build a classroom culture where students feel seen and appreciated. I would add to this practice by suggesting that ending your class with gratitudes is a way to synthesize all of the significant work that students contributed throughout the class. This could begin a cycle of positivity in a classroom, where students are praised throughout class for staying on task, and at the end of class for their insights and participation. 

GET STUDENTS...
Believing

Better or Worse?: Ask students to choose which of two options is the best response to a problem. Explain why in writing or discussion.

This question creates a binary that provokes us to take a stand that is backed in evidence and reasoning. To answer this question, students must consider the complexity of an issue and come to a decision that presents the best solution. 

Most of the strategies in this category include two acts of literacy: writing and discussion. If there is one takeaway from this category — or from all categories listed above — it is this: give students time to process and capture their thoughts in writing as a way to engage them. Quickwrites, or brief moments to jot down ideas and gather thoughts in writing before sharing verbally, are a key ingredient to processing and thinking through a concept.

It can be difficult to remember all that we have learned about teaching through the years. Whether you are a new teacher or have years of teaching experience, it's still possible to find fresh ideas for keeping your students engaged and actively thinking in your classroom! 


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RESOURCES, STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

BY LAURA RIGOLOSI

In college, I played rugby on an intramural team. As a “back”, my role was to run the ball up the field and score a “try” (basically, a touchdown) or pass the ball to a teammate so they could score. The players on the opposing team would try to tackle anyone with the ball, so the goal was to either pass to a teammate or outrun and evade defenders in order to score. It can be intimidating (who am I kidding, terrifying!) to run down the field with a scrum of women running towards me with the intention of taking me down. One lesson I learned quickly was not to panic and get rid of the ball like a hot potato before I got tackled — our captain would call this a “hospital pass”, as in let me throw away this ball before I get tackled by passing it to someone who is already so heavily marked that they may end up in a hospital. If we did a “hospital pass” in practice, it meant extra push ups — it was a careless move. Ultimately, we knew it would be better to pass purposefully than to give away possession of the ball or risk a teammate getting hurt. 

Those of us who work in schools have so many concerns as we return to school this year. Our concerns are warranted: we are concerned about students who may have missed many of their Zoom classes, and we are concerned how our students are processing this past year filled with personal loss, sickness, and political turmoil. The New York Times recently reported that “by the end of the school year, students were, on average, four to five months behind where students have typically been in the past, according to the report by McKinsey, which found similar impacts on the most vulnerable students” (Mervosh, 7/28/21). Many educators and parents are deeply concerned about students who may have experienced what many are calling learning loss.

We are looking for solutions as we re-enter our schools. But we need to think strategically — we cannot panic and toss the ball away in fear. We need to be thoughtful in our intentions, not reactive. 

Creating positive relationships

If ever there was a time to think of how to deeply engage students in our classwork, in our content, and in discussions about what makes each subject area so compelling, now is the time. 

Linda Darling Hammond, president of the Learning Policy Institute and professor emeritus at Stanford University, addresses how to reenter schools after this tumultuous year of remote and hybrid schooling. She reminds us to recall the most effective research-based learning methods, which include: “positive relationships and attachments… the essential ingredient that catalyzes healthy development and learning...and enables resilience from trauma” (Hammond, Forbes, 4/5/21). But positive relationships do not develop organically in schools; teachers and administrators can purposefully create positive relationships between the adults and students and between students and students. 

Positive relationships in school help students stay engaged and interested in learning. According to research from the Carnegie Corporation, “the degree to which students are engaged and motivated at school depends to a great extent on the quality of the relationships they experience there (Eccles & Midgley, 1989, p. 140; Lee & Smith, 1993, pp. 164, 180). Supportive relationships are necessary, although not sufficient without high-quality curriculum and teaching, to foster high performance among young adolescents” (Jackson and Davis, Turning Points 2000, Teachers College Press: 2000, p. 123). This concept is something we know to be instinctively true: relationships matter in every part of life, particularly in schools with young people. And while “high-quality curriculum and teaching” are paramount to students’ success, positive relationships in schools are equally important. 

Encouraging connections

There are ways to create positive relationships through the content we focus on in our curriculum, and in the ways we teach students to interact with one another. Hammond also reminds us, “Children actively construct knowledge by connecting what they know to what they are learning within their cultural contexts. Creating those connections is key to learning.” Again, helping students to build connections between new and prior knowledge is something teachers can plan for and create. 

​Putting Darling Hammond’s advice into action can be as simple as creating opportunities for interactions among students. For example, instructing students to talk to one another first in pairs for a set amount of time, and then encouraging pairs to expand to form small groups. As the groups continue to expand, students move toward whole class discussions. Setting students up with these types of discussion structures — moving from smaller groups to larger groups — and then encouraging them to debrief their discussions in writing or as a whole class is a way to build content knowledge and foster positive relationships. 

Constructing ways for students to discuss content-specific ideas and helping students process what they are learning and what questions they have is a way to keep students actively engaged in their classes.

As we get reacquainted with in-person instruction, I imagine there will be last minute programs and initiatives that will aim to catch students up and get them back on grade level. But let’s commit to no hospital passes. Let’s commit to what we already know about effective ways of learning and remain strategic about keeping students engaged. The ownice is on us to find ways for students to connect with the content. Let’s move through this year with teaching strategies that are intentional, rooted in research, and that will keep our kids engaged and talking. 

TAGS: LAURA RIGOLOSI, STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

BY LAURA RIGOLOSI

As I sit here at my computer, I could also be video chatting with a relative in Argentina while checking airfare prices, ordering pizza to be delivered in an hour, checking the weather for next weekend, finding an inspirational quote to add to my workshop tomorrow, and checking who the seven dwarves are because it’s been bugging me. And the funny part is, none of this would seem unusual to you! With a smartphone or computer and a good wifi connection, knowledge and information is a click away. Watching my own children attend school from home this past year gave me insight into how much technology is affecting schoolwork. Yes, they are still doing math, still reading, still writing, but there is also this: “Alexa, how do you spell “suggestion?” “Alexa, which fraction is larger- ⅔ or ¾?” Yikes! 

When we think about the future, we tend to imagine the remarkable technology that will continue to develop. And so, when thinking about what skills our students need to thrive in the 21st century, the gut response is more tech skills, more computer savviness. But acquiring more tech skills can only get us so far. What students need is the ability to think critically, and the ability to collaborate with diverse thinkers. To do this, our students need to be taught how to connect and empathize with others. 

Teaching empathy

When I think about students who have really stood out to me, from middle school to graduate school, I think of the students who could work with anyone — the ones that helped their classmates shine bright. Those are the students I remember the most. I’d like to make a case that it is possible to teach this, or put structures in place to teach students to think outside of themselves. To teach students the importance of getting along with others, and seeing the world from another point of view. 

In a recent speech by President Joe Biden, he urges Americans to practice empathy for the health of our country. He reasoned: “For empathy is the fuel of democracy. Let me say that again: Empathy — empathy is the fuel of democracy, a willingness to see each other — not as enemies, neighbors. Even when we disagree, to understand what the other is going through.” 

That ability to see “what the other is going through” is something we can teach. And as President Biden points out, this quality that may have once been thought of as a soft skill is one that we need to fuel our democracy. 

One way to “understand what the other is going through” is through reading. While I am not an immigrant, I can dive into the lives of Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters in The Namesake and experience Ashima’s deep loneliness in Cambridge, longing for her family, feeling like a foreigner. I can also experience her delight when she realizes she can recreate her favorite street snack from Calcutta — a mixture of peanuts, Rice Krispies, onions, and spices. 

As a teacher reading The Namesake in an English or Humanities class, I would invite students to sit with Ashima for a while. Live in her loneliness a bit, stew in the feeling of everything feeling unfamiliar. Offer students a choice for how they can engage with the characters, such as:

• Imagining, from Ashima’s perspective, what it might be like to go to the grocery store, or try to navigate the city bus schedule
• Writing from Ashoke’s (Ashima’s husband) perspective as he is balancing graduate school with a new wife and child on the way. (While students may not know these particular life events, they may recall being new in a school, and what it may feel like to have a new family member.)
• Crafting letters to and from the perspectives of Ashima and her mother, telling one another about their days, and assuring one another as they adapt to their new normals. Alongside pulling out details of Ashima’s characterization, we can study her sentence patterns, notice vocabulary she uses, and mimic her voice and sentiments. 
• Engaging in a class discussion centered on advice we might give Ashima as she transitions from feeling like a foreigner to feeling at home, or share, in small groups, recipes for what we do when we are trying to comfort ourselves in lonely spaces. 

There are so many ways to empathize with characters in English or Humanities classes, through reading, writing, and discussions. 

Connecting to content areas

In an interview with Life Magazine, James Baldwin explains, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” Baldwin reminds us all what it means to be human, and through literature we can feel each other’s pain, knowing we, too, have experienced the same. While the particulars may be different, we all have hard moments of hardship that have “tormented” us in some way. 

But how do we explore this in subject areas other than English or Humanities? Or for students who may not be able to empathize in such a way? For content area classes, Facing History offers a tool to help students forge a connection with something they have read or are exploring. 

Using this tool invites students to spend time thinking, probing, and considering how an event or problem is relatable in some way. Facing History suggests using these prompts with the chart above (available for download here): 

• Connect: How do the ideas and information in this reading connect to what you already know about ______________?
• Extend: How does this reading extend or broaden your thinking about ______________?
• Challenge: Does this reading challenge or complicate your understanding of ______________? What new questions does it raise for you?

Students can easily use this tool in History or Science, as they are learning about scientific discoveries or ethical dilemmas involved in scientific explorations. If we want to help our students become 21st century thinkers, we have to create scenarios in which they are stepping outside of themselves, extending into another’s world in some way. This is what will help students build ideas together. This is what will make our students think more complexly. 

• In Math and Science, we can build empathy by using culturally relevant examples in our classes, so students can see how our footprints impact each other, and the earth. 
• In Math, students can work off of real world dilemmas in their problem set, such as: how do we ration the natural resources we are plowing through in order to ensure our children’s children have clean water and clean air? 
• In Science, we can look at how much gas is saved each year by using a bicycle instead of a car in order to commute to and from school. We can also examine where that gas comes from, and how oil is a nonrenewable resource.
• In both Science and Math, we can use a data set with garbage tons, and explore where and how we will deal with existing trash dilemmas and the effects of recycling. 

Our equations can always be situated in the real world, which offers our young people another perspective. 

Another way to teach empathy in all subject areas is to normalize students helping each other, teaching one another, and working together to solve problems. Teaching students how to teach their classmates signals to them that you value collaboration, and that the ability to teach and work together are significant, valued characteristics. Encouraging students to step into a teaching role will also help them gain a greater awareness of the topic at hand — when students take on the qualities of a teacher, they are not only learning how to work with their classmates, but simultaneously becoming more of an expert on the subject. ​

​Technology will continue to develop at a rapid pace, and knowledge will continue to be accessible to all of us. Creating situations where students learn to step outside of themselves is what will propel our students into more complex and critical ways of thinking. We must continue to focus on how we can help our students think about each other and our world, and encourage them to collaborate and share ideas. As President Biden put it, this is what fuels our democracy. This is how we will stay 21st century ready. 

TAGS: 21st CENTURY SKILLS, LAURA RIGOLOSI